The Internet is changing the way arts are produced and consumed. DeviantArt, launched in 2000, has become one of the largest art platform on earth. Based on the idea of sharing and displaying amateur artworks, this social website has turned into a digital platform that has about 40 million monthly visitors. Not a traditional curator or biennial jury, but a network of common people openly dissects, criticizes and improves this giant open museum. Arts in the twenty first century is digital, and this project is about understanding its new dynamics, and developing the set of tools to cope with them.

The category structure of deviantArt

To study a social network site such as deviantArt, we used complex network analysis as our main tool, and did an analysis of dA's network first. With the support of my Veni Grant “DeviantArt: Mapping the Alternative Art World”, I received a data set directly from DeviantArt, of about 100.000 members. Beside the standard complex network approach of analysing links between members, we focused on the category structure of the DA member network, which revealed an unexpected picture. We found out that aside from the category of Photography, most categories do not create clusters of their sub-categories, but rather form mixed clusters according to production techniques.

We furthermore made use of the idea of citation networks, and analyzed the impact of deviantArt specific cite metrics and how these change user behavior. In another study, we tapped into how information flows in deviantArt, and if we can use this as a methodology to follow the impact and spread of artistic styles & genres. A last study that focused on the network of dA was to suggest a new methodology that would combine the use of complex network tools with image analysis tools to get a better understanding of the dA in its entirety.